Trump Wants America "Open For Business" Again — Will He Succeed?
Despite the positive election results on Nov. 5, we must forget that economically America is a sinking ship. Over the last several weeks, President-elect Trump has made public some proposals that are clearly designed to bring business back to America. For decades, our overbearing government has chased big business away, and has made it very difficult for small business to survive. This cannot be fixed without a drastic decrease in regulations and government spending. It will not be fixed if the Trump Administration attempts to save the military empire. Trying to preserve the empire will just shuffle the deck chairs on our sinking ship. America First has to really be America First. It can be done.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Chris Rossini, our co-host.
Chris, welcome to the program.
Great to be with you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And a lot of exciting things going on, a lot of anticipation, a lot of positive thinking.
You know, the administration is going to be changed, but I don't know.
I think this president to be, I think he sort of thinks he's president already.
You know, he's not doing it.
And then when you have to have to think about who is the president, you know, you had, is he still the president?
We don't know.
But anyway, there's a lot of variations going on.
And that's the way the markets are doing now, too, because there's a lot of optimism in the marketplaces, but there's a lot of concerns about how long this is going to last, the optimism.
And sometimes I think of one dilemma a person like Trump would have is one that I think I experienced.
That is, you want to be an optimist, but that's always wrestling with being realistic.
So, yeah, sometimes I'll say, it's okay.
We have more people thinking about the free market than ever before.
And this is very, very good.
And our numbers are growing.
At the same time, you look out there and you can find some problems.
You can find riots in the streets.
And you can find all of a sudden a bunch of drone missiles or airplanes flying over the whole country.
So there's always that.
And I think that's essentially what we do here at the Liberty Report.
Take all this and put it together, put it together with an idealistic vision of what a free society would be like and going from there.
And when some good things are done, we should praise it.
When the bad things are done, we have to be willing to criticize it because there's no such thing as perfection.
There'll never be perfect liberty.
We've had good examples and we've had bad.
And we have a lot of things to worry about.
But we truly believe that our approach moving toward more liberty for the people and following our Constitution would go a long way to help in the situation.
So we're hoping and wishing the new administration the best.
But I think everybody's going to have their job because in spite of motivations, there's a lot of things built into the system.
You know, the monetary thing, the inflation, and all the business cycle and regulation.
It's an overwhelming task.
And yes, I think they're addressing it and trying to help, but it remains to be seen what really will happen.
But I think when things are in flux, you think about finances.
And I think about the finances and of the country and individuals, how do they survive?
And one thing is we have partnered with Birch Gold in order to help individuals who are interested in a little personal protection too.
Although my argument is the most important thing that we invest in is the promotion of our liberty and let people alone, because I think no matter what would happen, if you have your liberty, I think if the economy crashes, but you have your liberty, it'll come back rather quickly.
So that's why I emphasize that.
But in the meantime, the more you can do to help oneself and the family, I think it's important.
So that's why we talk frequently with the Birch Gold people.
And what they do is they have a program where they're encouraging people to be out of regular stocks and put it into a gold investment IRA.
And that makes sense because the laws are cumbersome because if you have a retirement program, you can't put bullion in there.
So that's why you have to have this special funding.
But governments aren't bashful.
There's a big argument.
How much regulation should there be of cryptocurrencies?
But just think at the height of the depression, when Roosevelt came in to office, first thing he did was take the gold away from the American people and take their rights away.
So it is a political problem as well.
But the best we can do now, if you don't have another good alternative, is if you have some investments in IRA and 401k, that Birch will send you material and explain to how you can shift that around with no extra expenses.
So if you do want to get some information from Birch Gold, if you text Ron, 989898, they'll send you some material on how and what you can do.
And they don't charge you for that.
But I think it's information.
If you don't have, if you haven't looked into it, I think it's a good idea that you do that.
Click on Ron 989898 and take a look at it because it's a complex world.
And this is one thing offered out there to try to overcome some of the regulations that we have.
But today, Chris, we want to talk about money, of course, and we want to talk about, you know, what's going on in the future of our country and how the administration is going to meet up to their promises.
Trump was great at the promises that he created.
He's great at coming across as an optimist, and that's what people know and they want.
And we see some good things and we see some things he ought to be careful with.
And I always was very cautious because I never wanted to overpromise.
I was very cautious.
I said, I'm going to a medical school school.
I said, I better go to medical school before I brag about it.
And the same way, I'm going to Congress.
Well, I never really cared about going to Congress, but that happened.
So it's something I think the promises are helpful, but you have to follow through.
And one of the things going on right now that Trump is pushing in order to help keep the economy going and stimulate the economy.
And it's participating in expedited regulation approval.
That is, if you have a couple bucks and you're overseas and you want to come to America, Trump wants to invite them in on one condition, bring a billion dollars with you and invest it here.
And, you know, superficially, that sounds pretty good.
And I think when people have tried this in the past, it does work to a degree, but it's not a final answer.
I like the idea and encourage it.
But the one thought that I had was, you know, if it really works, why don't we take this as evidence, give that option to everybody, you know, even if you only had $100, you know, if you qualify to have legal entry, that you do this rather than, you know, it almost looks like you allow the people with a billion dollars to get exempt from the regulations.
And I think the most important thing could be is to show that's successful, that people will come.
But it also means if it's good for them, it should be good for all of us.
And that's my position of it in general.
But Chris has done some thinking about this and he would like to see it tested as well.
Chris?
Yes, Dr. Paul.
Yeah, Donald Trump is, he wants America to be open for business again.
And you can't help but support that.
But he is handling this like a businessman.
You know, this anyone that wants to invest a billion dollars in our country will get expedited through the red tape.
It's good.
You can't say that that's a bad thing.
Anything that gets government out of the way is a good thing.
But like you said, yeah, it almost sounds like, well, you can buy your way out of the regulations, which, you know, it doesn't look so good in that sense.
And I think also of the small business people, because that is what made America great.
I mean, look back at the old TV shows.
I watched them.
And Americans were doing everything.
Today we manufacture and do nothing, you know, service, we push papers, stuff like that.
So the small business, you know, they don't have a billion dollars to get past all the red tape.
They don't have lobbyists.
They don't have all these major campaign donations.
They don't have people that work for them, that work for them.
And then they go to the regulator and they come back and work for them.
This is all what the big business does.
So Trump is appealing first to big business.
I have nothing against big business.
I have a problem with them being in cahoots with the government.
That's a very big problem.
That's economic fascism.
We have far too much of that.
But to really make America great, get these regulations out of the way for the small businessman.
My father grew up in South Philadelphia.
He told me about growing up, he was selling pretzels, he was selling all types of stuff, and nobody bothered him.
And, you know, he made good money as a kid.
Today, that's unheard of.
We don't even know.
All we are is consumers here.
We don't make.
And that would make America great again with policies that help small business to get started and to flourish.
You know, I was thinking about our early history in this country.
It may be 100 years, 150 years after the country was established.
I don't think anybody even thought about, well, how are we going to get people to come?
How are we going to get them to come?
If they can bring some money and open up a business, liberty was here.
Freedom was here.
And it was exciting.
And people just wanted to get here for a very positive reason.
They didn't look for handouts.
They weren't into the welfare system.
It wasn't illegal immigration massively that we've just listened to recently.
But people did come and they didn't have to have a billion dollars or a million dollars a year, even $100, but they came and it was very helpful.
So that I think is important.
You know, I think dealing with a situation and how you can get a system that's fair to everybody.
I think one thing that they forget is that it's not as complicated as they think.
Sometimes they think of socialism and communism and all these ruthless organizations.
Then they also talk about laissez-faire.
Well, we don't want the ruthless dictatorships.
And most people say laissez-faire?
Oh, that sounds very sinister.
So they don't get interested in that.
But what we've adapted to, and I think it reflects on our difficulty in trying to sort this out and have corrections and improvements, is that what we work with is called interventionism.
We accept the notion that our government should be very much involved.
Well, the one place where they were supposed to be involved was give us sound money and legal tender of gold or silver.
They totally ignored that and gave us the Federal Reserve.
But otherwise, everything else is interventionism.
So that means it invites groups to come in and say, my intervention is this.
ABC, I want this.
I want my union to have this benefit.
I want my businesses to have this benefit.
It goes back and forth.
Everything fits in.
So almost anything you want can be fitted into interventionism.
And interventionism, generally speaking, drifts toward more and more government because it's found then that the dictatorship of the majority is worked into this because as soon as you have 51%, you can demand anything you want.
Then people get a little bit lazy and they take advantage.
Well, this is helpful.
I want the government to send me this and do this.
So it's the interventionism per se.
But today, still, the educational process we have still makes an effort to get people to understand that we don't need that much government.
We need government to protect our freedom.
And the people will find out what kind of intervention we really want.
So we want honesty and money.
And we want to be able to, you know, have voluntary contracts and these sorts of things.
That's the thing that makes a big difference.
But if you have interventionism, I think you end up with what we have now.
But then when it gets so bad, then the people have to speak out.
And I'll use the example of COVID.
They finally got so bad with the government running that show that they said, no more.
We've had enough of this.
And right now, the people spoke in this last election of this interventionism.
It's gone too far in the wrong direction.
But I would like to see them and give up more on interventionism per se.
It's rather than saying, well, let's do a little bit here, a little bit here.
How are we going to balance out if we give the union something?
We have to give the businessman something.
And that can all be worked out with voluntary contract.
So that's a little bit more precise on what I think has to be done because I think the witnessing of the last century or so, especially since the progressive era, we have allowed the noisy people to get what they want.
Trillion Dollar Empire00:03:05
And that's why we have this messy system that we're trying to clean up.
Excellent, Dr. Paul.
Yes.
Another proposal that President Trump has suggested, he wants to get corporate taxes down to 15%.
Once again, good.
You know, can't criticize that anytime taxes go down.
But again, we're talking about corporations again.
Us Americans, our personal taxes need to be drastically lowered.
I mean, it's sickening when I think about when I write the checks every year, what my family could have done with all this money, but it's gone.
And then we find out that it all goes to Ukraine.
I mean, what a talk about kicking us while we're down.
So our taxes need to come down, not just corporate taxes.
And most importantly is the government spending.
And Doji is a Doge is a great idea with Elon Musk, Vivek, Vivek.
But here's the thing.
The biggest black hole on our country is the military empire.
You could tinker around with all the ways the government employees, look how much they spend on hammers and lobsters and look at all the government vacant buildings.
All good.
You know, cut all that.
But the biggest one is the military empire and that has to go.
Now, will the Trump administration try to do all this just to save the empire?
I hope not because that's not going to cut it.
That's just shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.
And someday another president's going to have to come in and shut down the empire because President Trump didn't.
So it's going to have to happen at some point.
Do it now.
Let's not shuffle the deck chairs.
We were just reading that another trillion dollars they're proposing for a so-called defense budget.
Trillion dollars.
Do you know what Americans can do with a trillion dollars, the people of North Carolina?
You know, just anybody, even if you haven't lost everything to a hurricane, there have drones flying all over, you know, in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut.
Nobody has any answers.
Well, what's that trillion dollars doing?
At least tell us what the drones are.
But we know what this trillion dollars is.
It's to mess around in the world with endless wars and bankrupting us.
And that is what has sunk America.
There is no avoiding the empire.
And hopefully, Trump, you know, it doesn't look like it, but hopefully, in action, he does things to start shutting that thing down.
You know, you mentioned correctly about the corporate tax, and Trump suggests that we could live with 15%, and we could, but we still have to think about the spending.
That's the big thing.
Because as I described a minute ago, is how it builds intervention and builds it in all the special interests, you know, get control of government.
And they're the lobbying business is the big business.
And they're always lobbying for more spending.
Tariffs and the Slippery Slope00:07:48
But when people get to the point where they realize there's a problem, it's very hard to turn that off.
And I think that's the tremendous challenge the administration is going to have: how do you do that?
And because it's cutting spending.
So just think, well, let's say that the budget is so far out of control that theoretically, you know, in the old days, you could have 80% less government and we still could survive.
But what happens if somebody proposes, in order to, you know, save the system and work our way back to a sensible monetary policy, what we should do?
Let's count 1% out of everything.
Can you imagine the chances of that passing?
1%.
Oh, you're going to cut my Social Security.
The Democrats were right.
They always said the Republicans were Social Security.
Well, that's the political reality and the emotional reality of it all.
And it is true.
If you do some significant cutting, some people are going to be feeling very unhappy about it and they're going to be temporarily hurt.
But the whole thing is, what they don't want to think about is if we continue, and Chris, you already mentioned about how the debt keeps going up.
36 is going to go up another troy, two or three.
And it's sort of on an exponential curve.
And I don't see it slowing up.
I think the effort is great.
And there will be some benefits.
There will be some freeing up of some things in the market.
And that helps.
That helps increase in productivity.
That helps to keep prices down a bit.
But it doesn't solve the problem of debt that needs to be monetized by the Fed.
And that's where the stickiness is of inflation.
It's there.
And we have to deal with that and recognize it's very, very sticky.
And therefore, we have to get people convinced that if you refuse, that you can't bite the bullet and say, well, we have to admit it.
We have to cut back on a little bit of spending in reality.
Then it's just going to continue.
But they have to believe that if you continue to do this, yes, the spending will be cut.
The dollars won't buy anything.
So it's like cutting.
I mean, if your dollar only buys 20 cents worth of stuff, you've just lost 70, 80% of your spending.
So it was cut.
So the market does the job for you if we don't.
But that is where the real danger is.
And we have to be realistic about that, Chris.
Fantastic, Dr. Paul.
I'll finish up with the final Trump proposal, and that is tariffs.
And he seems very set on this.
Seems like he has lots of support from at least what I see online from people.
So it looks like that's the way we're going.
On the one hand, I get it, even though I don't agree with it.
Because as we've been talking about, you know, what's manufactured here in America, it's easy for your mind to go blank.
Now, I'm sure there are things, but in general, and compared to how it was, it's very little.
I was Christmas shopping last week with a few people and we went to this store and it was just bursting with stuff, stuff everywhere you look.
And we walked out and I said, you know, where's making all this?
I said, do you know anybody here that is in manufacturing?
Because I said, I don't.
And they didn't either.
You know, we don't know anybody that manufactures.
Yet we have all this stuff, you know, bursting out of these stores.
So I get the appeal of, okay, well, make Americans pay more for stuff from overseas so that you could help business here.
I get the appeal to that.
But the problem is Americans pay more, you know, as consumers.
Inflation is outrageous today.
The last thing I want to do is pay more.
You know, and tariffs are a slippery slope.
We have a bad history, especially in this country.
You have the Murrill tariff of 1861 that led directly to the Civil War, you know, to the South secession.
It was because tariffs were outrageous that were imposed on the South.
And then you had the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 and the Great Depression that followed after it.
So tariffs have a bad history because they're a slippery slope.
You know, other countries want to retaliate and then you retaliate again.
And then we get to the point where Frederick Bastiat says, when goods don't cross borders, soldiers will.
And then you end up at war.
So tariffs are a very slippery slope.
It's much better to cut the state, what they're talking about with the doge, with the taxes, with the red tape.
That's the way to go about it.
Tariffs can go in a in a very go to a very dark place.
And, you know, it looks like that's what we're heading to.
I guess the best advice that we could say to President Trump is to be very, very careful.
You know, on many occasions, there have been items which we can't compete with with foreigners.
I mean, there was a time when people wouldn't buy an American car.
They wanted to buy a foreign car.
And the problem was, was the ability for us to compete.
But we have to remain in denial of that because America always competes and we're always the best.
So they say that, no, you can't do that.
So what we have to do is keep the competition out because they're stealing our market.
So it's very, very hard to say, well, maybe we have too many regulations.
Maybe we have a monetary system that encourages price inflation.
And maybe it's our fault to a large degree.
Maybe our educational system is not the best and introduces these bad economic ideas.
But I think we have to be realistic that if we have a problem on any item whatsoever, say clothing, people can make clothes pretty good overseas.
And I bet you that a high percentage of our clothes, I look at some of my things.
I have every once in a while I'll see me in the USA, but we can't make it as cheap.
So why deny that to people?
We want to be in denial.
So they say, you know, there's a limit to that because what if they said, well, that's true.
80% of our clothing comes up from overseas.
Okay, let's put a 20% Tariff on all clothing coming into this country.
How would that help our people?
But if the problem is our monetary system, too many regulations, and an attitude that encourages us to have inefficiency in our markets, and that has to be addressed.
You can't substitute it by saying, oh, okay, we don't want to see, we can't live up to that type of competition.
We can't compete with it.
But actually, it's an economic benefit.
You know, all things being equal, if people can produce something at half the price that we can, that's a blessing.
So we buy from them, we save half our money, and then we buy something else.
I mean, we're not going to quit doing, you know, building anything.
But the whole thing is, we have to realize it is, we want to do something to make sure that our economy is very productive because production can cover over.
You know, that's why some of these tariffs will work.
You have protection for a little bit.
Prices And The Dollar Go Down00:00:57
Oh, yeah, and businessman here, you know, benefit by it and things go up.
But those are temporary things.
But if you have, if you can increase production, you know, our goods and services would go down in price.
But that involves, you know, the monetization of debt, spending in government.
Prices go up because the dollar goes down.
But not a lot of people are talking about that as a solution because, yes, they're talking about the deficit's too big and we spend too much money.
But as optimistic as I try to be, I'm not expecting that at the end of four years of this administration that prices have gone down any, and they probably will have gone up a lot.
Unfortunately, that's my assessment.
I hope I'm wrong.
But I do want to thank all our viewers for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.